English Dub Review: In Another World With My Smartphone “Engagement, and an Uninvited Visitor”

It’s a Scooby-Doo mystery this week, including the talking animal sidekick.

Last week, we were left on the heart stopping cliffhanger that the duke of the neighboring bland fantasy village, A.K.A. Belfast, had been poisoned. This week, the poisoning is solved in 5 seconds of Touya arriving and healing. Above all else, this episode by far showcases how overpowered and perfect Touya is to a frankly obnoxious degree. In Another World with My Smartphone lacks any sort of tension in its events, falling back on ham fisted cutesy girl moments that fall flat as Touya’s Mary Sue nature makes him too gosh darn perfect to have the girls fight over him.

Oh, and girl fights there shall be as this episode welcomes the archer and princess into Touya’s harem, Yumina Urnea Belfast (Felecia Angelle.) A wonderful 12-year-old little darling who falls head over heels for Touya after he insultingly simply cured her father and capture his attempted murderer. Now the basic acts of saving her father and catching his assassin would be cause for admiration and infatuation in her case but how can the audience become enveloped in that emotion when that causation is so brief. The entire Scooby-Doo mystery of who almost killed the duke is over in less than 7 mins, with of course Touya using his magic to instantly solve the crime. So given that the crime was solved in a manner that any brain dead moron can solve it with Touya’s same overpowered magic, how can that be attributed to him being so smart as Yumina puts it?

It’s a fake sense of character infatuation that really gets under my skin. Touya isn’t really defined by the good deeds he does, he is defined by how useful he is in situations that lead to good results. To illustrate the point, picture two firemen, one puts out a house fire by himself saving the family inside from the blazing inferno in a feat of great mental and physical strength, the other snaps his fingers and the fire vanishes. Both clearly have stopped the fire but the 2nd fireman is practically obligated to save the day with his instantaneous fire stopping. If he doesn’t he’d be a monster, not a hero and that’s the exact position Touya is written to. He never feels like a character who can grow past just the nice guy persona as his omniscient powers hold him back from ever having a character flaw to grow past.

It doesn’t help as the show revels in any chance to show off how “amazing” Touya is and how he treats it all rather nonchalantly. It leaves him a rather big wet blanket on the entire show but then again, the other girls aren’t doing much to liven things up. Yumina introduction as a character is rather one note, namely playing off the awkwardness that Touya is now engaged to a 12-year-old. I do find it fascinating that Yumina has a level of maturity fitting of an older character, it allows that aspect to show her kind and nurturing wife attitude towards Touya. You just got to keep forgetting she is still only 12.

Writing wise this has cranked Toya’s perfection to grander heights and that is gonna be detrimental to the entire shows run. No matter what girls join the team now, what powers Touya will instantly master, what dangers await him, it will never matter. If the show has left the main character indifferent to the tension of the new world he has arrived in, why did he need to come from another world, to begin with? Stay in the regular world where quite sadly a more interesting narrative could probably be found.